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If the US is preaching a human rights message, it is entirely undercut by hypocrisy. I would argue that advocacy by the United States actively harms efforts to

If the US is preaching a human rights message, it is entirely undercut by hypocrisy. I would argue that advocacy by the United States actively harms efforts to advance human rights in many parts of the world, because the US so transparently fails to practice what it preaches. This hypocrisy and selective attention deprives the term "human rights" of any universal value and turns it into a political weapon. The message is clear. You need to sign the human rights convention that we drafted, but we don't need to ratify it because our domestic laws are perfectly sufficient. You can't torture your citizens, but we can extraordinarily render them to black sites and have someone torture them for us. You can't detain your political enemies without trial, but we can lock ours up indefinitely in Guantanamo. You can't interfere with our democracy through Facebook advertising, but we can riddle your government with CIA agents, abduct your president or bring about "regime change" by means of a "humanitarian intervention". There's an entire Wikipedia article entitled "United States involvement in regime change". The list of democratically elected leaders who were replaced with tyrants with the full support of the US government makes for sobering reading. It's clear that there was never a point in US history where the bolstering of democracy abroad took precedence over US interests. If you want to argue that the US is no worse than average, then I'm not going to argue too strenuously. If you want to claim that the US is a beacon of liberty and justice, I want to see some evidence. All I see is the banner of "human rights" being used as a cloak to protect US national interests and discarded whenever it's inconvenient.

sanderjd 9y ago
I don't think your comment contradicts my comment. My point is that all the "you need to"s and "you can't"s in your second paragraph are still useful, regardless of our own actions. There are two solutions to hypocrisy, you can either stop doing the thing you say is bad or you can just stop saying it is bad. Is the second solution better? All else equal, a world where the US attempts to hold other countries to a higher standard than it holds itself is better than a world where it keeps its mouth shut entirely.

sanderjd 9y ago

I don't think your comment contradicts my comment. My point is that all the "you need to"s and "you can't"s in your second paragraph are still useful, regardless of our own actions. There are two solutions to hypocrisy, you can either stop doing the thing you say is bad or you can just stop saying it is bad. Is the second solution better? All else equal, a world where the US attempts to hold other countries to a higher standard than it holds itself is better than a world where it keeps its mouth shut entirely.